In 1984, he was picked to run Houston Natural Gas and engineered a merger with a rival firm in Nebraska to create Enron, which owned the first coast-to-coast pipeline network.
This behavior meant that by the time a rival firm proved that a new market was viable, Motorola would be two years behind the competition and forever a distant follower.
If you were a successful broker on Wall Street in 2008 and 2009 your employer likely threw wads of cash your way to keep you from fleeing to a rival firm.
FORBES: Are Merrill Lynch And Morgan Stanley Facing A New Wave Of Broker Departures?
Though the display resembles a primitive computer game in its blockiness, Dexter Turner, the president of Op Technologies, a rival firm that is developing a similar system, points out that this is quite adequate.
More common are promising molecules that flunk clinical trials and so earn no return at all, or drugs that shine for a few months before being trounced by a better pill from a rival firm.
Part of the dispute revolved around a 750-space underground parking garage that WME would have had to share with a rival talent firm, the Gersh Agency, which had recently moved into a building next door.
Most important, the agency argued that the landlord had breached the terms of their agreement by leasing space in an adjacent building to Gersh, a rival talent firm.
Cambridge Display dominates the large-molecule segment, having just acquired its main rival, a British firm called Opsys.
Her instinct was to leave a spot for another VC in part to prevent the firm from backing a rival.
To be sure, Autonomy will have to compete against Microsoft, which has bought FAST, a Norwegian rival, says Madan Sheina of Ovum, a market-research firm.
The company had also lost its place as the world's biggest employment firm to Adecco, a European rival formed in 1996 by the merger of Adia Interim of Switzerland and Ecco of France.
It has raised more money since its founding in 2003 than any rival in China, according to Preqin, a research firm.
ECONOMIST: Hony Capital wants to help Chinese firms go global
Separately, rival dairy firm Dairy Crest is to shut down a processing plant in Birmingham and three distribution depots in Oxfordshire.
Engineering firm Dyson has accused German rival Bosch of placing a mole within its headquarters in Wiltshire.
BBC: Dyson claims rival Bosch placed mole within head office
In March 2010, it acquired UK-based bonded metals warehouser and logistics firm NEMS, a month after Goldman Sachs had acquired rival Metro and several months before Glencore and JP Morgan moved into the business.
FORBES: Riding Glencore Wave, Commodity Trader Claude Dauphin Becomes a Billionaire
Hedge funds SAC Capital and Jana Partners bought 8% of the firm and then slammed it for squandering a chance to merge with rival E-Trade Financial Corp.
Korean electronics firm Samsung has hit back in a patent dispute with Osram, a rival maker of light emitting diodes (LEDs).
An insider jokes that Morgan's underperformance relative to Goldman is a public-relations ploy to ensure that the firm remains more popular than its rival.
The only thing that might make the Brown family members sell the firm is if Diageo did take control of Jim Beam and became a mighty rival in the American spirits market.
His notion is that an innovative firm that wins a monopoly then becomes complacent, and is displaced by a sharper rival, and so on.
Walgreen has been dogged in the wake of its contract dispute with pharmacy benefit firm Express Scripts (ESRX) which has caused a flood of customers to switch to rival pharmacies that were in Express Scripts networks.
FORBES: How Flu Shots Became Big Sales Booster For Walgreen, CVS
Separately, the firm also announced a link-up with Borders, in which Amazon will take over its rival bookseller's online operations.
Ford's other main rival, DaimlerChrysler, may be taking a risk buying 34% of Mitsubishi Motors, just as the Japanese firm has revealed that it has covered up product defects for 20 years, but at least it has used Mitsubishi's problems to force down the asking price and to install its own man as chief operating officer.
Even if bad vibes from the French government keep Novartis (nyse: NVS - news - people ) from bidding for French rival Aventis (nyse: AVE - news - people ), it still remains a firm to watch for investors in American drug companies such as Pfizer (nyse: PFE - news - people ) and Merck (nyse: MRK - news - people ), who compete directly with the Swiss giant.
The Dutch firm has also made a deal to sell ICI's adhesives and electronic materials businesses to its German rival, Henkel, if the takeover goes ahead.
For another, having a rival helps raise Traq's profile--perhaps attracting a buyer in the form of a larger, established firm that specializes in auditing conventional telecom expenses, such as ProfitLineor Teldata Control.
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